“I feel that by focusing on your customer success over your own, you’ll not only be exhibiting behavior characteristics akin to a Client Champion, but your customers will be more successful. They’ll want to do more business with you and your company, and as a result, you will see your own success grow.” – Leon Baumann in today’s Tip 1428
Do you have Raving Fans?
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Dell Technologies
Leon Baumann on LinkedIn
Leon Baumann on Sales Success Stories Interview
John Westman on LinkedIn
1427: Raving Fans (Part 1)
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today we’ve got part 2 of Leon Baumann’s two part series on Raving Fans. If you haven’t heard it yet, you’ll probably want to go back to tip #1427 and then come back here. Here’s Leon again:
Leon Baumann: Welcome back Daily Sales Tip Community. It’s Leon Baumann again, and I’m here for part two of my guidance on in building Raving Fans in your customer base.
Last time, I talked about the need to be a Raving fan of your customer as a person and what is a Raving fan.
Today, I’m going to share my thoughts on creating Raving Fans and then what to do when you have one. So, here we go.
How do you create Raving Fans?
Well, in my perspective, the easiest way is to start thinking more about the customer success than your own.
Now, of course, we all have sales quotas, managers, personal attainment goals, whether you have a goal to be number one in your company so that you can become a guest on Scott’s show, or maybe making enough money that you feel like you’ve finally made it, or simply getting it through a tough quarter without getting fired. But in my 22-plus years of selling, I found that my success is a trailing response to my focus on my customer success.
Now, this is much more than simply ensuring that your customer believes the ROI or TCO savings that your solution can bring to their company. It’s even much more than ensuring that the deployment and implementation of your solution goes well and the objectives that you set out in your proposal are met and realized.
Yes, actually, to create Raving Fans, you need to start thinking about, what this ROI, this objective, these outcomes can deliver for the individual that you’re working with.
Can you help them meet their MBOs? Can you help them get promoted? Can you help them get recognized as a thought leader within their organization? Or even better, can you help them get recognized as a thought leader in their industry, outside their organization, which maybe will open the doors to new career opportunities?
You need to take the time and bring your empathetic curiosity to the conversations that you have with your customers to go beyond what the outcome can do for their company and into the details of how the outcome can impact that individual.
What are their personal goals? What are their aspirations? And how can your solution help them as a person, as a leader?
And finally, what do you do when your customer becomes a Raving fan?
Well, first and foremost, if you have the opportunity to continue to work with them, do everything you can to maintain that success level and keep them as a Raving fan, it’s a lot easier to keep Raving Fans than it is to build new ones.
And second, as they start to get more comfortable in telling their own story of success, both internally and externally. Look for ways that they can get visibility. Find them speaking opportunities at your customer conference. I’m sure you all have an annual customer conference that is just dying for customers to come up and tell their great story. Or maybe find them speaking opportunities at your internal conferences like your sales kickoff, or maybe at a local industry-specific conference in your community.
Do what you can to get their story in print, whether it’s a case study, a white paper, whatever you have the ability to do, and their communications department, of course, will approve.
It might be easier to showcase their success through a post on LinkedIn, telling their story, celebrating them amongst their peers. Of course, you’ll want to get their approval before you do this, but you can also tell your customer story to anyone that will listen, both internally to your organization and externally to other customers.
This will help them build their personal brand as a thought leader and as an executive that has a track record of success in delivering outcomes to their business.
And as I mentioned in the beginning, once they become a Raving fan, they can be that perfect candidate to take reference calls with your other customers, helping you build your success.
Now, before I wrap this up today, I’d personally like to thank all of my customers that have become Raving Fans over the years. I realize they might not wear a jersey on Sunday that says Baumann on the back, but for all of those customers that have helped me see around corners when it came to navigating their organization or have reached out to me to have me help them on a new project as it’s come up or have even infinitely advocated on my behalf. Thank you for your help. And thank you for being a friend.
So, in our two-part series, we’ve talked about first what is a Raving fan in part one, and then today, how do you create Raving Fans and what do you do when your customer becomes a Raving fan.
Now I’m sharing these tips with you today for I’m part of a movement to increase trust in the sales profession called the Client Champion. This is a program focused on salespeople delivering fantastic buying experiences to their clients, on becoming the trustworthy salesperson that the buyer wants, and while making lifelong friends who start out simply as prospects.
I feel that by focusing on your customer success over your own, you’ll not only be exhibiting behavior characteristics akin to a Client Champion, but your customers will be more successful. They’ll want to do more business with you and your company, and as a result, you will see your own success grow. Good luck, Go BUCKS, and keep growing!
Scott Ingram: For even more links than yesterday, click over to DailySales.Tips/1428. There you’ll find links to the first part of this series, links to connect with Leon, and his full Sales Success Stories interview. You’ll also find a link to connect with John Westman, the adjunct Harvard Professor, who built the Client Champion Program. Again, that’s all at DailySales.Tips/1428.
Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click right back here for another great sales tip. Oh, and if you’re a Raving Fan of this show, please do me a favor and share it. Thanks for listening!